Barrington Stage Company has world-premiered nine, yes nine, of Mark St. Germain‘s plays, and the most recent is Dancing Lessons, on stage now. I really like his plays–Ruth, Freud’s Last Session, et al–for their old fashioned storytelling and well-developed characters. No surprises, but emotionally-clean, good theater.
Dancing Lessons is no exception, with its exploration of the tentative communications between a man with Asperger’s Syndrome and a woman whose Broadway dancing career is over when she is hit by a cab and unable to heal from the accident.
Again there are no surprises plot-wise. Even the sharp-edges of Asperger’s are worn off if you’ve read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, which has been turned into a musical, now on stage in London, or the hilarious Rosie Project, an offbeat romance written from the point of view of the male ‘hero’ who happens to have Asperger’s. Why is it that the men are the ones with Asperger’s?
Regardless, the p
lay has a crackling pace, with both broad and subtle humor, but also moments when the whole audience was holding its breath. Our male hero has come to the dancer, who lives in the same Manhattan building, for dance lessons before a formal attire event he will attend. The kicker is he doesn’t like to be touched. The 10 or so minutes when they first shake hands to the very tender and revealing lovemaking is some of the most remarkable theater I’ve seen in ages.
And when the dancer’s leg brace comes off and the man’s posture straightens up, their Fred-and-Ginger moment is cathartic for the whole audience. It’s an interlude that has to end, however, as the characters return to their reality.
Yes, the play is about damaged people, physically and psychically. But it’s also about those blessed moments of love and grace, moments to cherish on stage, in books, and hopefully, in real life.
fashioned play, allowing characters to develop, patterns to emerge, and a third act crescendo to an emotional climax, combined with musical theater tropes. We wait the whole show to see a character dance, and when he does…it’s a dream.
And “Somewhere”? I think it will soar, too, first to New York, then beyond. Tomorrow, I go to Lincoln Center and will see how that feels after this experience. I see a play about another New York legend, Moss Hart, and his autobiographical “Act One.” The theater is in the blood–dance and dream on!
structure on the installation. I found myself responding to Norman Rockwell’s “New Kids in the Neighborhood,” which he did for Look because the Saturday Evening Post didn’t want his social commentary works.
pointed than most of his work. The video of Nina Simone performing–amazing.
In the New York Times, Cavett quipped that he wasn’t the first choice to play himself, and the House Manager said everyone associated with the show is in love with him. I got to the theater so early that I saw him arrive and share cheery greetings around. Woo hoo!
Some juxtaposed the obvious with the less so: the exhausted Elvis and Liberace impersonators discussing Israeli-Palestinian relations in the bar over a drink; the clowns getting dressed in their outrageous costumes while figuring out whether to have an affair; the woman in a gown and a tuxedoed man awaiting their performance dissect the tensions in a friendship that source from mathematical theory and the psychology of the self.
Still, the acting, mostly in duets, is delicious, the sets magical, and the seeming randomness does add up to something–a meditation on information that is meaningless when pursued for its own sake, secrets, memory (both spectacular and faulty), and the pain that comes from closing ourselves in to our own importance.
flowering, and decline–and the way community helps restore the heroine to hero status, after it’s demise. Weems takes the ordinary, the everyday joys and pains, and monumentalizes them. Don’t miss the chance to see this one.
y want to get over to Barrow Street to see him while you can. His over-the-top energy suits this outrageously plotted show about the coming together of a little man and the monumental Barbra Steisand. The play is full of laughs, some at the expense of stardom, most at the absurdities of people just trying to make it through life.
on this glorious, faux-spring day. There were the men playing chess, the protesters, the hippie guitar player, the black dudes tumbling, the pianist wrapped in his coat, scarf, and hat, the blue-haired girl walking a dog, by shuffling along on her 8″ black and white, zig zag, platform-heeled boots, the pyramid of bodies getting their picture taken.
akes on new physical realities. Unlike Sherman, she clearly remains herself, constructing new identities. Hilariously, she teaches herself ballet from a book and is photographed as a prima ballerina, on pointe. The video of her own choreography defies the idea of the artist’s ego.
We ducked into the Whitney for the superb Hopper show and then the Guggenheim for the transformative 
The quiet, a true rarity in New York restaurants, and the only decoration on the beige-gray wall a sprig of green leaves with small white, feathery buds, diminutive on the long wall reinforced the spare, Japanese aesthetic.
